The spouses of people who are in the final stages of the employment-based green card process can now obtain authorization to work in the U.S. Previously, spouses had to wait until the the green card was in hand before they could work, which could take years (sometimes over a decade) due to backlogs. In the Star Tribune, Mark Schneider, the Associate Director for Employment-Based Visas at the University of Minnesota, said that faculty had left the university (and the U.S.) because spouses could not work: “It puts a lot of pressure on families when one spouse comes here to do big stuff and the other has to sit on their hands.” The Obama administration hopes that the new rule will “help U.S. companies retain foreign talent and ward off competition from countries with looser immigration policies.”